What Indie Games Shall We Play?

We’re about to start an all new independent game with the lovely Di… gaaaargh, I’ve just been gagged. What was I saying about being free to blog what I wanted?  Never mind, I’ll reveal all in a few days, probably after we’ve been to the pub for our first project meeting. You think I’m joking…

In preparation, we’re going to have something of an indie games day here on Tuesday. Our Chris does not really know the indie games world so we need to expose him to its wonders.

What games do people recommend he plays?

Suggestions so far (pulled from Twitter):

Eufloria
Braid
Samarost
Darwinia
The Life Of A Pacifist Is Often Fraught With Conflict
Limbo
Shadow Complex (is this really indie?)
Eliss
Fieldrunners
Passage
Snapshot Adventures
Blueberry Garden
Cut It
Under The Garden
Skullpogo
The Path
Don’t Shit Your Pants
ToriBash
World of Goo
Machinarium
Saut
Gesundheit
Mount & Blade
Recettear

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Size Doesn’t Matter Day Part 2

Yesterday was Size Doesn’t Matter Day, organized by Jamie Cheng from Klei, when game developers talk about how the length of a game is or isn’t important relative to its other merits.  First Alex wrote his thoughts, now Anthony Flack now has his say. We’ve included links to more blogs at the end of this post.

So, it’s “Size Doesn’t Matter Day” today? A worthy topic of discussion for a game designer, if ever there was one. I don’t think I would ever say that it doesn’t matter – I’ve probably spent more time over the last ten years pondering issues of game size and game scope than any other design element – but if there is one message that I would like people to take from this discussion, it’s simply that BIGGER ISN’T NECESSARILY BETTER. A game’s size should be appropriate to the game’s form, and what constitutes an “appropriate” size may often be smaller than you think.

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Size Doesn’t Matter Day

Today is Size Doesn’t Matter Day, organized by Jamie Cheng from Klei, when game developers talk about how the length of a game is or isn’t important relative to its other merits. I’ve included links to several other blogs at the end of this post. Anthony Flack has also posted his thoughts.

We’re all talking about game length, something uppermost in my mind as we plan how long to make Cow Patrol on iPhone/iPad. I say how long, perhaps I really mean how deep – how much replay value we plan to have.

One of the most comment complaints from game journalists is that games are too short. As has become obvious within the many reviews of indie hit Limbo, a high quality game will still be pulled up and criticised over game length.

One of the most common questions publishers ask when pitched a game is, “how long is it?” On the assumption that they aren’t just being over-friendly, what they really want to know is how long it will take to play through the game; they want to know how much bang they get for their buck.

But how long is a game and how long should it be?

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The River of S***

A lot has happened since our last blog post. We’ve certainly been living the ups and downs of the game industry. If you thought making a game out of clay was hard enough, add in game industry politics.

The big news is that Cletus Clay is now not going to be on Xbox Live Arcade. At least, we won’t be self-publishing it on the platform because apparently we no longer fit in with Microsoft. Given the current state of Xbox Live Arcade and sales thereon, perhaps they are right!

We have plenty of interest from publishers on both Xbox and PlayStation 3 but at present we prefer to retain our independence. This does, however, mean that Cletus Clay is going to have another development change. Anthony and Alex will continue the project in due course and we will be funding it from our other projects unless one of you happens to be feeling very rich and generous!

As Anthony puts it:

“We’ve swum this far up a river of shit and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna give up now.”

Bye bye Xbox

Secondly, and this is much happier news, we’re pleased to have invited the lovely people over at Games Faction to live with us. Sure, there have been a few arguments over who uses the milk and the cost of toilet roll these days, but two indies are better than one! Together we’ve been enjoying developing on Apple’s lovely iPad, and definitely not playing too much Plants vs Zombies.

And finally, we’ve actually updated our website. We have more to do but it’s a start!

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Snazzy New Aliens

Are you looking at me?

A lot of the feedback we got from people who played Cletus Clay at Eurogamer last year made it clear that you wanted to see more variety in our aliens. We are listening, and we are currently working on creating additional squishy pink extraterrestrial lovelies for Cletus and his brother Emmet to pummel.

As with a lot of our models, the alien is animated in sections: we have alien body animations, alien head animations and alien weapon animations. To add some variety we are concentrating on giving some of the aliens different head types.
To achieve this we are using a mixture of Photoshop wizardry and new clay models. For example, Mr One-Eyed-Alien (third from the left) was created using the original alien head and some Photoshop work. The head with the segmented eye stalks (second from the left) was created using part of the original alien head and new clay eye stalks that were photographed and digitally added.

Anthony is very keen that the alien heads are different enough to provide variety, but similar enough to make it clear that they are all part of the same Alien race. For example, Mr Three-Eyed-Alien (fourth from the left) is perhaps a bit too different from his Alien brethren and so probably won’t make the cut.

Anthony and Sarah are both brainstorming to come up with as many different and weird looking alien heads as possible. Not all of them will make it into the actual game as only the very best will receive the Anthony seal of approval.

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